TeX Live and distros

TeX Live is included in a number of system distributions
(“distros”). TL was originally conceived and is still
distributed as a benefit of the TeX user
groups, including prebuilt binaries and independent of any specific
operating or packaging system, but we are glad to see it being used as
the basis of the TeX installation in other systems.

We have a mailing list specifically for discussion of TL integration
in distros: tldistro@tug.org. Feel free to
post, join, or peruse the archives if you are interested.

System distributions all have their own packaging systems, so tlmgr is not used for TeX-related
package updates by any distro that we know of.

Repackaging TeX Live downstream

If you are considering (re)packaging TeX Live, you need to carefully
consider how to handle, for example, the fmtutil and updmap programs
(often used directly) and hyphenation patterns (maintained via
tlmgr generate language in native TL)—among
many other things.

Purely as an example of two distros' choices, you may wish to peruse
the Slackware
build information, and the TeX-on-Debian
and Debian-TeX-Policy
documents. We have no opinion pro or con about Debian, Slackware, or
TeX on any distro; we're merely noting that they have written up many
decisions that anyone creating a TeX distribution needs to make, for the
possible benefit of anyone needing to research this.

You can get the stable TL releases as tarballs from tug.org, which you may
find easier to deal with than ISO images. Please try to minimize
downloads of these big files from our central server.

For each major release YYYY, we maintain a branch in our source
repository named branchYYYY with
the most important post-release patches, especially to the compiled
source code. The idea is that distro maintainers can incorporate those
changes without wading through all the (exceedingly numerous) changes to
the trunk. We also maintain a README.branchYYYY file with a
list of the changes in the branch's Build/source/ subdirectory.
The binaries in the branch are not updated; it is just a place to
provide important source patches.

Distro maintainers of TeX Live

Here is a list of distros and their respective maintainers, to the
best of our knowledge.

Distro-specific Perl/Tk installation
The GUI for the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) is programmed using Perl/Tk and
thus requires the presence of this package. Furthermore, it must be
compiled with XFT support, which is usually the case with GNU/Linux but
not necessarily other systems. When you are installing the native TeX
Live (rather than whatever your system has packaged), and you need to
install Perl/TK, here are some sample commands and notes: